Matts Leiderstam - Unknown Unknown: Stockholm

It is with great pleasure that we inaugurate the new season with Matts Leiderstam’s fourth solo-exhibition with the gallery.

The personal viewing experience of historical paintings is the point of departure for Matts Leiderstam’s work. Researching these paintings results in complex series of œuvres that often span a long period of time and are equally informed by the processes of the artist as that of the art-historian. Another crucial factor in Leiderstam’s work is the fact that we arguably live in a time where the fundamental concept of ”seeing” is being dramatically transformed. This shift is in many ways similar to the technical revolutions of the 18th and 19th century – a time from which we still draw our conceptions of the ”art museum”, ”landscape” and ”portrait”. It is in the dialogue with the present seen through the lens of the past that Leiderstam’s artistic practice is nourished.

The majority of Leiderstam’s projects since the mid-1990s have been ”made after” older works that he has appropriated from the context of the art museum. He is also interested in the museum’s own notes – its archives, inventories and catalogues – where the institution sorts its collections by artist, genre, technique, size and time of acquisition. Parts of the collection are clearly assigned greater value and give more attention. At the very bottom of this hierarchy are works of which very little is know.

We are pleased to present Leiderstam’s most recent series Unknown Unknown. These works are all made from historical portraits of people we do not know who they are, made by artists of which we do not know anything. Most of them are from the collections of The Collection of European Painting at the University of Uppsala and Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf. The works seamlessly take the forms of paintings, photography and sculpture. In the gallery space they are installed in such a way that the relationship between the model and the artist is underscored. As a spectator we are invited to identify with either of these and meet their gaze for the first time.

Matts Leiderstam is born 1956 and lives and works in Stockholm and Malmö. He exhibits widely and his work can be found in a number of private and public collections around the world. His large-scale seminal installation Grand Tour is currently shown at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (until September 15) and in the Laumeier Sculpture Park St Louis Once seen (The Moving Panorama is on view until August 25. His project After Image was shown Konsthallen Artipelag’s inaugural exhibition Platsens Själ in 2012 and the retrospective exhibition Seen from Here was shown 2010-2011 at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Malmö Konstmuseum; Turku Art Museum, Åbo and Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vasa Finland.